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Take-Two is facing a lawsuit over its NBA 2K series from a company who owns the rights to tattoo designs that are inked on NBA players and make an appearance in the games.

ESPN reports that the company in question is Solid Oak Sketches, who has a deal worked out with certain NBA players so that they own the copyright on many of their tattoo designs. In this case, they claim that Take-Two has used eight different designs without their permission on Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, DeAndre Jordan, Eric Bledsoe and Kenyon Martin in the 2K series. Examples include a child’s portrait found on LeBron, and butterflies on Kobe.

The way this is supposed to work is that if an athlete appears to promote something, in this case a video game (this is especially significant with LeBron on the cover of NBA 2K14), there’s supposed to be a separate rights deal worked out with Solid Oak to ensure the tattoo designs can be shown with the proper permissions.

It may sound a bit silly offhand, but the players know the deal, Solid Oak has a right to copyright their design and make that kind of deal, and according to them, Take-Two knew about the deal, and simply chose to ignore it.

Solid Oak maintains that they actually offered Take-Two a license for the designs for $1.2 million. It might make sense as to why Take-Two wasn’t exactly leaping at that price, but allegedly they ignored it completely. Solid Oak says the fact that Take-Two received that offer made it clear that this was supposed to be a negotiation over legally owned property which Take-Two simply blew off.

There’s precedent for this exact situation as well. A tattoo artist named Victor Escobedo successfully sued THQ for including UFC fighter Carlos Condit’s copyrighted lion tattoo in their game without permission. He asked for $4.1 million, but instead received $22,500 in the end.

In 2014, the NFL told its players that they would have to get waivers from the artists for their tattoos to appear in EA’s Madden games. EA had previously settled a situation with quarterback Colin Kaepernick for showing his distinctive tattoos, wary of their own past history with tattoo drama. Way back in 2004, EA was sued over a Ricky Williams tattoo that appeared on the cover of NFL Street, and in that case, Williams himself was also sued by the copyright owner, hence the NFL itself stepping in and requiring these artist wavers. In this case, Take-Two could be in a pretty tough spot since these are multiple designs across a number of players, and one of them was on the box art for NBA 2K14.

It’s unclear how this will play out, but history has shown that Take-Two may be found legally in the wrong here, and have to pay the rights-holder compensation, as well as rethinking their future policies regarding players, tattoos and copyright.